As a sequel to last year’s “Very TRS-80 Christmas,” we have this ad for the TRS-80 Color Computer 2. I’m not sure what makes this model “better” than the first Color Computer (CoCo), aside from obvious: different keyboard, ugly case-retooling, and perhaps more RAM.

Unfortunately, this unit ages to a nasty brown and its rubber-dome keyboard isn’t much of an improvement (I still like the CoCo 1’s keyboard better). But at least Tandy saw it fit to advertise the unit with a Christmas theme, which is quite relevant to the season at hand.

[ From Computers and Electronics, December 1983 ]

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Hate to ruin your joke, but as I’ve mentioned before in a few places on this site, the TRS-80 CoCo’s BASIC manual was actually the best I’ve ever read or seen for any system. It actually is entertaining, with colorful cartoons and clear, easy-to-understand examples.

Also, there were a number of online information services available at the time, such as Dow Jones and CompuServe where you could actually check those very things listed over a modem, even on a TRS-80 CoCo 2.

I actually remember my father buying one of these while I had two commodore 64’s… and I ended up with all 3 machines fairly quickly… of course I didnt like the TRS-80 nearly as much as the commodores… but it was definitely a fun and fugly machine lol